Disney Buyout Could Be Death Blow for Lucas Videogames

When Disney announced its $4 billion acquisition of Lucasfilm on Tuesday, the Mouse was clear about what it wanted: Star Wars.

Everything else was just gravy, and the company had little or nothing to say about its plans for any of the myriad other properties or Lucas divisions that it had just bought — including, to the great chagrin of gamers, LucasArts. Comparing the games divisions at Disney and Lucas, it’s difficult to imagine what exactly LucasArts has that Disney would want to hold on to.

Established way back in 1982, creating games on Atari platforms, LucasArts has significant emotional resonance for players of a certain age. It struck gold in the point-and-click, story-based adventure genre in the ’90s; sharp designers created fondly remembered games like Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island and Loom. Steve Purcell, co-director of Pixar’s film Brave, cut his teeth on LucasArts adventure games.

But that was long ago. When the adventure genre died, LucasArts became an all-Star Wars, all-the-time studio. And it hasn’t been particularly great at it. Games like the RPG Knights of the Old Republic hit big, but its expensive triple-A action game Force Unleashed sucked, and this year’s Kinect Star Warsreally sucked.

LucasArts has been a revolving door of talent. Longtime Star Wars writer and Force Unleashed creative lead Haden Blackman left in 2010 and now works for social game company Kabam. Lucas hired well-known designer Clint Hocking away from Ubisoft, and he left within two years. The division has had three presidents resign in the past four years and is currently under interim leadership.

Disney has said little about games — but it hasn’t said nothing. On a conference call with investors on Tuesday, CEO Bob Iger said that the company’s plans for Star Wars gaming were likely to “focus more on social and mobile than we are on console.”

“We’ll look opportunistically at console, most likely in licensing rather than publishing,” Iger said, but qualified this by adding that in Disney’s view, Star Wars characters lend themselves better to “the other platforms.”

As a developer, Lucas has utterly missed the boat on those other platforms. There is no Star Wars Facebook game. It’s licensed out the franchise to other publishers on smartphones, but the only LucasArts Star Wars game on iOS is the Phantom Menace-based puzzle game Pit Droids.

So what is it that LucasArts does? Its only announced game in development is Star Wars 1313, a big-budget, hyper-realistic console game that its developers say is going for a “Mature” (17 and up) rating. Not quite in alignment with Disney’s stated strategy.

“For the time being, all projects are business as usual,” a LucasArts spokesperson told Wired via e-mail this week. One may be tempted to concentrate solely on the latter half of that statement, but it’s the first part that is most telling.

In contrast to Lucas’ uneven gaming efforts, Disney’s Interactive Media Group has some major hits on its hands. Targeted acquisitions of key game developers and properties have given it strong presence in the fast-growing social and mobile spaces. It’s got a major kids’ virtual world with Club Penguin, a smash hit mobile timewaster in Where’s My Water? and a Marvel-themed Facebook game that even hardcore gamers are digging called Avengers Alliance.

Reached by Wired after the acquisition, a Disney Interactive Media Group spokesperson said the division had no comment at this time.

With a small army of hit-making game studios under its umbrella, Disney already has the proven talent to start expanding its library of mobile and social games into Star Wars using its own its in-house teams.

So given Disney’s stated goals, what exactly does it need LucasArts for?

Star Wars 1313 may determine its own fate. Sometime in a short while from now, the following will almost certainly happen: Like Darth Vader arriving on the Death Star, Disney executives will visit LucasArts and get a full rundown of the studio’s activities. Its sharpest gaming guys will pick over 1313 and get a sense of whether it’s a project worth proceeding with, or another boondoggle.

If 1313 looks like something really special, perhaps Bob Iger will bend on his “licensing rather than publishing” strategy and it will come to fruition as planned.